Warhawk: The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra, Book 6

So, book number 6 in the Siege. And yeah, it's ok. It's not badly written, it caps off the White Scars storyline for the Horus Heresy quite well. It's less dull than the Solar War, better written than the First Wall, less padded than the Lost and The Damned, less confused than Mortis. Not as good as Saturnine, but then Chris Wraight ain't no Dan Abnett.Spoilers ahead.On the other hand, and this is a general criticism of the entire series... maybe the stakes would be a bit higher if the loyalists lost a battle once in a while? Like, we've in book 6 now and basically all the traitor leadership is dead and half the traitor legions have bugged out altogether. Saturnine saw basically every named Son of Horus other than Abbadon die. Kharn's now gone. There's no named Night Lords or Emperor's Children left; they all died in books 2 and 4. Sigismund apparently spends this whole book executing any traitor ranked Captain or above, just to make sure that no-one interesting is left to speak for the baddies for the rest of the series; we have a couple of Death Guard, Abbadon and some Thousand Sons left, and that's it.Meanwhile, for the good guys, I think we've lost about 5 named space marines and a couple of historians in the whole series. We keep being told how hopeless and desperate the situation is for the defenders... but they don't actually seem to be losing any individual battles. Like, the spaceport falls in book 3, but that almost entirely happened off-page. We're just told about it afterwards while Gav Thorpe focuses on his tedious Imperial Guard road trip novel. Even in Abnett's excellent Saturnine, the score is 3-1 to the good guys, with the one battle they lose being the one they planned on losing, and the others successfully taking out a whole traitor legion and destroying the entire elite of another. Here in Warhawk, the White Scars successfully retake one of the two spaceports and take out Mortarion. Sanguinius has been wandering around destroying titans bare-handed and holding a ditch for 3 books against literally anything that can be thrown at it, including the Iron Warriors, undisputed masters of siege warfare. It's getting silly.As a whole, the series is kind of blowing it on the 'beleaguered defenders against overwhelming force' side of things. They just can't seem to write a book where a) a significant named Loyalist character dies (Mortis even resurrected the guy who Abnett crashed into a ferrocrete wall in the stratosphere, and a sodding newborn baby has somehow survived for over 2 books on the front line now), or b) the Loyalists suffer a really significant defeat. Mortis is the only book where a Loyalist counter attack hasn't been wildly successful. It doesn't feel like the Imperium is in a desperate situation when you only ever show us victories; frankly, I feel more like it's Horus's forces that are on their last legs.The series needs an Empire Strikes Back moment, where Han is in carbonite, Luke's lost a hand and the Rebel Alliance is in disarray. The Imperium needs to be very soundly beaten and put on it's arse, and that just hasn't really happened anywhere; they seem to come out on top in almost every encounter. Instead we're repeatedly told at the start of each book that the traitors have just broken through the next wall or whatever, despite the fact that they don't appear to be able to win a single fight and whatever advantage they used to have in numbers is pretty much gone now. Whenever a daemon pops it's head into reality, it gets handily crushed by whoever happens to be standing around nearby within a couple of paragraphs, and there's only like 3 traitor legions left in the field.How the hell are they winning? And really, do we need to keep painting the traitor Primarchs as such an incompetent band of losers? They're just not very threatening anymore. More than half of them have gone, one way or another; in return, Dorn now feels a bit tired after staying awake for 6 books and Sanguinius has developed a slight headache from imagining being Angron for 10 minutes. They couldn't even hurt the Khan without Mortarion getting himself killed in the process. They just don't feel like Darth Vader-level threats; this is the Benny Hill gang invading Earth.The fact that he's somehow managing to lose to this complete shower (despite seemingly being able to accurately predict the entire course of the siege from before the first ship arrived in system) makes Rogal Dorn's unassailable strategic genius look a bit overrated, frankly. As does the fact that the few serious battles he's managed to lose, the one in Mortis and the one at Lion's Gate, were at his most heavily-defended positions and he failed there because his opponent's plan was not clever enough for him to predict it.It's getting very hard to feel like the Imperium in general, or any of the loyalist characters mentioned in the last 6 books, are under any threat whatsoever, so thick is the plot armour and the fanboyish devotion to making the loyalist Space Marines always win. And Book 7 promises to basically be 300 pages of the Sanguinius Single-Handedly Kills Everything No Problem Show, which means we'll be going into Book 8 with the Emperor gambling everything on teleporting to Horus's ship for... no particular reason, since he'd clearly win the war just by staying on Earth with his 3 remaining fully-functional primarchs and the 700-odd named loyalist characters who cannot die.

I've enjoyed the Siege of Terra series more than pretty much all but the earliest of the mainline Horus Heresy series that precedes it. Towards the end despite a few of the books being excellent and very few being even borderline bad, it felt like margarine scraped over toast. Too many stories that went nowhere or added to things that needed nothing more.The Siege of Terra has been a pleasantly tight affair, with one minor plotline exception and this book I enjoyed immensely for pushing forward the 'how the imperium ended up godawful' which has been a little missing in action to date, and for being a bit more upbeat. The White Scars use some imaginative tactics, the Death Guard are no pushovers, and there's some nice character work here.The only issue I have with the book is that the margarine effect is in full force with our good friends the happy band of perpetuals making their way to whatever they've been heading towards for what feels like forever. I liked their introduction back in the day as it reminded me of the sensei and some of the old lore but at this point the pay off for the diverting effect they have on the story will really need to be outstanding to make up for the way they've been scraped thin through so many books.Maybe they'll follow through that old plan from the Jaq Draco books after all... just 10k years early...

This book is a hard slog, very much indicative of the hard slog of Imperial forces against the death guard.

i love the book

*Mild Spoilers Ahead*I've a number of issues with this novel. First and foremost, why the hell is it called Warhawk?!?!?! Jaghatai Khan is in probably 2 chapters of the book and has probably less than 100 words of dialogue. A dreadful shame considering hes one of the deeper and more interesting characters in the entire series.Instead we get lots of attention on "walking cliche" characters like Serious McSeriousFace Sigismund, Lone Wolf Loken (🙄) and Dour Dorn. To be honest with Perturabo off the board, Dorn doesn't really need all that much more page space to develop.Then of course there was the far too many subplots involving some interesting newish characters (Basilio Fo, Erda) that just went nowhere, and some interesting not so new characters (Oll, Grammaticus) that also went nowhere.There was lots of opportunity here to develop some less well known characters and scenarios. Khalid Hassan and Malcadors army maybe? The Black Sentinels? (Remember those guys? What happened to them eh?). Even the crazy warp reality bending/outrageously giant demon stuff was oddly absent apart from the super lame "Mortarion is making everyone sad" schtick.Its a big misstep, especially following the likes of Saturnine and even Mortis. Scars and Valdor were real Tour de Forces and some of my favourites in the whole series but this one really misses the beat.

Easily tied for the best entry into the siege series with Saturnine. Depending on your preferred characters and legions, maybe better. (I'd count the scars, death guard and templars as some of my favourite factions so possible bias)Huge lore moments. Arguably the birth of the black templars, as well as the imperial cults as we know them today. Kharn and Sigismund scenes incredibly well done and really capture the journey of both characters. Needed more Fafnir though.Lokken sections seemed a little forced but well written.Satisfying conclusion to the scars arc and once again can't find fault in CW handling of one of my favourite legions. Fantastic culture building in the first few scars novels continued and really adds a bit of emotional depth to what can feel like a quite hollow series.Managed to beat my expectations without any unforeseen fatalities and without overly buckling the established lore.Not quite the land raider scene we all wanted though.

i read all these type of books